I have a static IP. For whatever reason, it is listed as a Dynamic IP.
Oh, I know this one.
Whoever your ISP is, gets their IP addresses in blocks, which they designate as Dynamic. Certain subnets get marked as static - and are generally reserved for loops - T1 etc. When you get a 'static' IP address from your ISP, they create a DHCP block for you with only 1 IP address in it. So your 'static' IP address is really a 'dynamic' IP address drawn from a pool of 1 possibility.
Back in the bad old days - 3 yrs or so - when I was doing internet tech support, I had a woman in literal hysterics over the fact that she had disconnected:
The power cord
The cat 5
The coax cable
In order to do a power cycle on a crappy 3com cable modem. (Still hate sharkfins)
This woman was in a litteral panic - complete with wailing, incoherant utterances, etc. She could not think straight enough to reattach the cables. Now, I hate to be rude, but WTF was she doing owning a computer!?!?!?! These were 3 seperate connections that look nothing like each other. One is a screw on connection, one is an overgrown phone jack, and one is a barrel jack. They won't even plug into the wrong place. It's not like she had 2 phone jacks for a modem & couldn't remember which one to put where.... They only go 1 place. This is closer to the average user than your average slashdot reader.
IIRC there is a strip mine in the US (Kentucky/NC?) that detonates tons of amthor at a time. They actually stagger the blast because the first time they lit it off, China thought we had popped another nuke.
And like it or not, soldiers and their families voted overwhelmingly for GW Bush in the last election.
I actually do not believe that to be true. Bush, w/ 51% of the vote, was re-elected with the smallest margin ever for a sitting wartime president. I don't think that any group voted for him in an "overwhelming" manner.
this year I had to do a MB swap on XP, and it puked as already installed on a different system. So they transfered me to a live body. Took almost an hour to get both of us to understand the 25? characters on my liscense and the 25 she read back to me for the activation. Got to love outsourcing to a country that doesn't speak English but the company tries to teach them to speak with a specific English accent.
What I want to know is why anyone would pay someone to license a DRM scheme when they can be certain that the same person they're paying is going to turn around ad give their customers a tool to crack the DRM.
My response:
Because if I encode it, the RIAA won't sue me reguardless of how easy it is to strip that DRM. They can't sue me if they don't sue Apple.
Your response:
They don't sue Apple because they have a contract with Apple that Apple is honoring.
What makes you think they're going to be willing to sign a similar contract with a provider whose DRM scheme is a ripoff of Apple's sold by an enemy of RIAA?
My response:
Because they can't claim Apple's DRM is sufficient, but someone else's isn't. [...] There are other companies that are already selling music that may want to provide the option to provide apples DRM in addition to MS's plays4sure.
IIRC the **AA is requiring DRM that fulfills certain requirements, their contracts do not tie them to a specific DRM - since that would require a contract renegotiation if the DRM is broken, as long as the DRM fulfills the requirements.
Your response:
Of course they can. No record label is under any obligation whatsoever to do business with any particular distributor if they don't want to. They can claim whatever the hell they want to. You clearly have no idea how the business world, the legal world, or the world in general works on any level. In short, you are a moron.
No, if I produce a knockoff of Apples fairplay that is tightly controlled enough to fool Apples software, the **AA cannot claim that it's not sufficient, as long as it meets the requirements they laid out in the contracts they have already signed. The **AA is not stupid enough to ignore the fact that DRM is quickly broken and needs to change. Nor are their clients stupid enough to lock themselves into contracts that are going to require manditory re-negotiation whenever it happens.
You are correct, the music industry is not under any obligation to engage in business with any distributor. Check my quote: There are other companies that are already selling music that may want to provide the option to provide apples DRM in addition to MS's plays4sure. I posed that people who already have contracts with the music industry and are selling music to people under 1 form of DRM may want to sell it under the most prevelant form of DRM in the music industry.
If Jon's fairplay clone meets the requirements of the contracts those companies already signed, then the music industry doesn't get to revoke the contracts because they don't like Jon. In the future they don't have to renegotiate contracts with those companies, and in the future they can try to exclude it from contracts. But if their contracts have a DRM performace standards clause, then they are stuck with whatever DRM meets those standards.
So to respond to your personal attacks:
I do know about the business world. If distributors can make more money selling music wrapped in Jon's Fairplay knockoff, than it's going to cost them to do it, they will. They are not going to hold DeCSS against him - it's business not personal here.
IANAL but, I have seen enough contracts to know that, most of the time, restrictive clauses such as DRM and other security measures are performance based and not defined by name - hence my assertion that if Jon's version of Fairplay meets the same standards as Apple's, the music industry can't say it doesn't qualify based solely on who it comes from.
As for not knowing how the world works, I am probably older than you & been around a few extra times to boot, it's been 14 years since I got my BS BIO. After you've figured out how to legally run a 'shine still and still graduate, tell me about knowing how the world works.
"In short, you are a moron." This was the best you can do? I am correctly identified as an "Anti-social, Misanthropic, Bastard" on my good days.
Because they can't claim Apple's DRM is sufficient, but someone else's isn't. Also note that not all of the music is controlled by the RIAA. There are other suppliers out there thay may want to try this. There are other companies that are already selling music that may want to provide the option to provide apples DRM in addition to MS's plays4sure.
IIRC the **AA is requiring DRM that fulfills certain requirements, their contracts do not tie them to a specific DRM - since that would require a contract renegotiation if the DRM is broken, as long as the DRM fulfills the requirements.
What I want to know is why anyone would pay someone to license a DRM scheme when they can be certain that the same person they're paying is going to turn around ad give their customers a tool to crack the DRM.
Because if I encode it, the RIAA won't sue me reguardless of how easy it is to strip that DRM. They can't sue me if they don't sue Apple. Hmm, claim you loose money to piracy, that online services don't work (because you've 'tried' to make them work), then sue the only one that does make money. Yeah, that'll go over well.
Re-read the artical, he's not offering the decryption algorythm to play fairplay media. He's offering the algorythm to encode the media with fairplay. He's offering to sell it to other people to make thier media work with the iPod, not other players work with iTunes.
Not a week goes by that I don't receive several offers in the mail for "pre-approved" credit cards, offering minimal $300 credit limits in exchange for annual fees of as much as $80, interest rates of 21%, increasing to 30% if I so much as make a single late payment or go a penny over my limit, and acknowledging that they can increase my interest rates at any time if they see fit, even if I am making timely payments to their account.
They call it 'general default' and it can be tied to as much as a disputed phone bill that gets posted to your credit report.
Also note that CC companies are exempt from state usary laws. Due to the interstate nature of the CC industry the courts decided in 1974 that only the usary laws in the state they are incorperated in apply. Hence Dellaware is a very popular place since it has no usary law.
Thus while MA caps interest at 29.4%, Citibank can happily charge 32% because they are not incorperated in MA. Note that a mortgage company from Dellaware would not be able to do that since they are required to get a state liscense in order to do business in MA. No such need for a CC.
Actually, you're making the point very badly since this law would cover US based gambling sites as well. There's nothing nationalistic going on here.
IIRC there are no US based gambling sites that are not directly tied to US B&M casinos because there are laws & regulations which prohibit them. That's why they are all located offshore to begin with.
1. Yes, though there's little reason not to do both. Terrorism is a national security problem. Crime is mostly a local problem. Local problems are best handled and funded locally.
I wouldn't tell that to your local police dept, over half their budget comes from the federal govt. The point is that 3000 deaths in one instance has cost the US over $100B in retaliation/theoretical prevention, yet $10M is concidered too much to spend inside the US where there are more deaths than this each year due to drive by shootings. How does that improve my & your real security?
2. The 4th Amendment doesn't apply to foreign terrorists and it doesn't apply to enemies in a war. And it shouldn't. The 4th Amendment is to make Americans secure from their government, not to empower foreign enemies to kill more Americans easier
I never said it should, but removing oversight doesn't improve the likelyhood of catching anyone, it just reduces the likelyhood of the govt doing something wrong not being caught.
3. There is oversight. Congress is informed.
Is this informed like the full security council was informed of the NSA program - as required by FISA? Oh wait, FISA required not only briefings, they required warrents. Of course because they didn't need no stinking warrents, they didn't need to do the briefings either. If they didn't obey the law then, why can I assume they will now?
But I don't see anything in your post that will make Americans safer from terrorists. You seem to be more interested in making terrorists safer from Americans. I don't think you'll get very broad support for that agenda.
I don't see anything in this bill that will make American's safer from terrorists either. I do see stuff that makes Americans less safe from their own government.
It is when the US military is taking actions against US citizens on US soil.
Next on the agenda:
Well, since I am not calling overseas, much less calling known terrorist phone numbers, I can be sure that no legal action can be taken against me.
How exactly do you know that? If you call Bob, who happens to have forwarded his phone down the street to the Abdi's where he is having dinner, and the Abdi's gave $10 to the local charity that happened to send a cow to a village in Afganistan, that happened to be the hometown of some 'terrorist'. According to this bill, they have every right to monitor your call. Not only that, they can monitor you for 89 days before having to 'notify' the security panel. Note that's 'notify', not request permission to continue. How about if your work requires you to make an international call. If the contents of your call would put the oil industry out of business in 6 months, you don't think Bush & co. would know about it before the end of the day? How about if you're a lawyer and you have to discuss your case with someone who's not in the states? How about if you're a journalist?
Nobody is saying that they shouldn't have access to these tools. What they are saying is that somebody needs to be watching the fox while he's guarding the henhouse. And like any good fox, the Shrub is objecting that he's perfectly trustworthy. Even if I buy that line, how do I know that the person taking office in 28 months is going to be? Hell, how do I know the peon over at the NSA is?
No, I need either oversight, or to trust every member of the executive branch higher than an intern. Of the 2, I think oversight is the better option, 'cause I barely trust my town council not to invoke eminant domain to turn my house into a parking lot - and even there it's mostly because hills make bad parking lots.
Check the back information on the AT&T debacle in CA. The device they installed can monitor all the voice calls going through the substation in realtime. Not only is it technically possible for them to monitor the calls, they are set up to do it.
Hopefully this will get tested in court in the next few years if it does become law. I don't see how a judge can not find it unconstitutional.
What scares me is the possibility of the Pres declaring "state secrets" and getting the case blocked from being heard. The court can't rule if there isn't some sort of violation they can rule on. If they have to uphold "state secrets" and block the evidence, they can't toss the ruling no matter how unconstitutional they think it is.
How about all the calls to Iowa? New York City? Ohhh, listening to every call to Pakistan doesn't effecty you. That's nice. It does effect everyone who needs to call outside the country. Hey none of those lawyers need to make calls outside the country. Oh, I know, everybody who has parents/grandparents/relatives in Pakistan is a terrorist & needs to be listened to.
Listening to calls to Pakistan has no effect on my life whatsoever. Hell, I don't even know if they are listening, how can it have any effect?
The legal responce is "It has a chilling effect on free speech." While not directly forbidding you from saying something, the constant threat of being listened to will diminish your percieved freedom to say things. How likely is somebody to say "Bush is a fricking asshole and is ruining the country" to someone overseas, knowing that the call is going to be monitored and statements like that may put their name on the no-fly list. The speach isn't prohibited, but it certainly is inhibited by the assumed monitoring, and the atmosphere of retaliation presented by the govt.
Saying that the potential for abuse is reason to do without is absurd.
It's exactly why our government was constructed as it was. To prevent the government from abusing it's power. A strong Monarchy with absolute power is capable of manuvering with blinding speed in reaction to external events, since that's what we need in this world of post 9/11, we should just dispense with this whole election & constitution thingy and Crown Bush. After all, the potential for abuse is no reason to do without.
Try these questions:
Why exactly should the federal executive branch of the government be exempt from oversight and checks & balances, when every other branch and level is constrained?
How exactly does that make us safer?
How exactly does exempting the executive branch of the government from the rules embodied in the Constitution, show to the rest of the world that we are in fact a country of laws?
How exactly does declaring the use of torture against our "enemies" proper, but it's use by our enemies an obscenety, not make us the two faced hypocrites most of these terrorists/the world already think we are?
When you can answer those questions with coherant arguments, then we might have something to discuss.
The police is a prime example. What is to stop the police chief from taking over a city? The military?
The military does not prevent the police from taking over a city. The act would be done long before the military could mobilize a response. What keeps it from happening in a coup like fasion your quote implies is the certain knowledge of what would happen afterwords. The things that help minimize the possibility of more manipulative takeovers are oversight, internal affairs, checks & balances, etc. The police are able to get permission to do wiretaps, the feds can get permission up to 3 days after the fact already. In both cases, thier reasoning and suspicions are reviewed by people who's intent is to keep them inside the lines already established. In the 30 year history of FISA 3, count it 3 wiretaps have been turned down. Why by god, they must have a tremendously high hurdle of evidence if once a decade, the government can't make it over it.
If you're making phone calls to terrorists, or they're making phone calls to you, your lines will get tapped.
If you're not and they try something like that, you can sue the living crap out of the people that are doing it, and you'll have lawyers out the door to back you up. And you'll win.
The Govt will invoke state secrets stating that they cannot reveal whether or not the infomation relating to your arrest was actually generated from the NSA program or not. To confirm or deny this fact would jepordize an ongoing 'National Security' investigation. As such, you must prove your case for damages against the US govt with no information other than that wiretaps were provided to the FBI/Police by an unnamed source.
The govt has been sued over this & to date they have 3 victories & 1 partial victory using the 'State Secrets' defense. The partial victory is because the Federal judge in question declared the NSA program illegal & filed for an injunction, but also denied the claim for damages.
Ask Isreal how to prevent terrorist attacks. You know what their answer is? - you can't.
Ask the Secret Service how to prevent someone from killing the president. You get the same answer, you can't.
Ask the Police how to prevent people from killing each other. Same answer, you can't.
The only thing you can do it manage the risk level. Yes, a portion of that is intelligence, and investigation to identify threats. A portion of it is bodies in place to act on the intelligence. And a portion of it is there after the fact to track it back & use it as intelligence twords the next time. Terrorism prevention is like your harddrive, it's going to fail, the only thing you can do is try to do the reasonable things to make the MTBF as long as possible.
Note that the word reasonable is the keyword here. You can greatly reduce the possibility of the president not being assasinated if he were to just stay in the nuclear shelter under the Whitehouse for the entire time he's in Office. They don't do that because it's not reasonable.
Now ask yourself:
If 10X the number of US citizens who died during 9/11, die every year in homicides, is it 'reasonable' to spend $2B a week on preventing another 9/11, and refuse to spend $10M a year for more police?
If it is 'reasonable' for the Federal Govt to ignore the 4th ammendment to prevent deaths, why isn't it 'reasonable' for the local police to do the same? After all, they handle many more deaths on a yearly basis than the Feds do in a decade.
If the Feds are going to be 'reasonable' about the use of the wiretapping, why do they insist that any oversight of their behaviour will impeed their job?
The constitution garantees protection from "Unreasonable search and seasure". Over and over the courts have made clear that 'reasonable' requires either oversight (in the form of warrents) or the presence of evidence of immediate threat of bodily harm (a trail of blood leading into a house). It's hard to argue the presence of evidence of immediate threat of bodily hard, 24/7/365 for years.
I do not believe that anyone is stating that the NSA/FBI/??? can't perform wiretaps. Everyone I hear is saying they have to follow the rules, and be subject to oversite if they want to perform the wiretaps. If it's a real investigation, with real targets, and real enemies, then provide the list of people you are attempting to investigate to the FISA board & get the taps. Yes, the provisions say they can tap all calls going to a person, as long as they get approval within 3 days of starting. I find it hard to believe that it takes more than 72 hours to print off a copy of a warrent request, rubber stamp it, and have an intern cart it off to the FISA board. Why do they not want oversite? What exactly are they doing/going to do that people outside the department with top-secret security clearance can't know about it, or it will 'grossly hinder' their ability to perform their jobs?
It's not a battlefield - it's a war of ideology, if Vietnam & Korea didn't teach us anything, then I suppose we can try to fight that with guns again.
by their own admission & by the terms of the current bill they say doesn't go far enough, they want total, unfettered freedom to monitor anything they want, anywhere, any time. Please explain, with specificity, how exactly that conforms to the 4th ammendment.
I don't trust the govt to restrict themselves to dealing with this 1 threat/reason/excuse for needing this power, and they have shown that they want nobody to be able to question how/why/when they are doing the monitoring. Therefore, there will be nobody else to reign them in.
China already listens in on my phonecalls to my parents, how much worse is the call quality going to be while the NSA is listening in too?
The problem is that this isn't monitoring calls to a specific individual. The leaks have indicated that calls to anyone in certain regions are being monitored. Do you know what it takes to get put on the 'terrorist watch' list or the 'suspected terrorist ties' list? I don't, and I'm not certain there are any rules. From what I can tell, if you've donated to a charity that has provided food/education/supplies anywhere in the Middle East in the last 10 years, you are eligible. If you work for one of them, then you're probably on it. If it's affiliated with a Muslim organization in the middle east, make it a certainty. If the rules the NSA wants to follow were applied to regular law enforcement, everyone would be under 24 hour surveilance in case we called Bob 4 states over who's brother was once convicted of passing around a joint at a Grateful Dead concert, in order to try & get a joint of our own.
Why is it complicated? Because, it takes everything we tout to the rest of the world as our greatest asset (our Freedom & Civil Liberties), and says they don't apply. Yes, sometimes you have to perform surgury to remove a tumor. However, I don't recall anyone ever recommending that the surgical process include shooting the patient in the head to limit the amout of blood in the field. FISA is surgury, it's clear, it's tight, and it makes certain that the rules are followed. This new bill & the current NSA program are just the result of the neighborhood butcher trying to perform surgery but not wanting to take the time/make the effort to do it right.
....the right of protection against unreasonable search and seasure is a Constitutional right. That means that even Congress can't bypass it. If it's not constitutional to do wiretaps without judicial oversight, it doesn't matter what Congress says. SCOTUS has clearly and repeatedly declared that without judicial oversight, any wiretapping is a violation of the 4th ammendment. How the Republicans can possibly think that just because they pass a law, it's going to change 40+ years of precident at SCOTUS is beyond me. The reason we put people on the SC bench for life is so they don't have to care about politics. It's their job to think about the future & long term, not from today to the election.
The other thing is, I have heard a bunch of rhetoric about it, but I have never heard a coherent argument as to why - if you have enough information to start a tap, you can't file paperwork within 72 hours of starting. Are they seriously expecting me to believe that 3 Days isn't enough time to have some intern print off a boilerplate & fill in the lines? Or is it that I am supposed to believe that there are so many calls to suspected terrorists that no increase in the number of interns/clerks can keep up with the flood of paperwork?
Either way they are treating us all like a bunch of morons. The latest estimate I saw was that the WoT was costing us $2B a week, I guess actually paying people in the US that money to do real security work just wasn't as politically expediant as paying it to corperations for military hardware and support.
Hmm, his business is suing people. Perhaps the gaming industry could go after him for Lanham (sp?) act violations. IIRC using a baseless lawsuit to harm someones business is illegal & fineable. Hmm, if SCO can sue for $5B for 326 lines of code, $15,337,423/line - we can translate that to suits instead of lines.... I count roughly 20 lawsuits, that's $302M, add tripple damages... $1.2B against his lawfirm? That might shut him up.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoever your ISP is, gets their IP addresses in blocks, which they designate as Dynamic. Certain subnets get marked as static - and are generally reserved for loops - T1 etc. When you get a 'static' IP address from your ISP, they create a DHCP block for you with only 1 IP address in it. So your 'static' IP address is really a 'dynamic' IP address drawn from a pool of 1 possibility.
- The power cord
- The cat 5
- The coax cable
In order to do a power cycle on a crappy 3com cable modem. (Still hate sharkfins)This woman was in a litteral panic - complete with wailing, incoherant utterances, etc. She could not think straight enough to reattach the cables. Now, I hate to be rude, but WTF was she doing owning a computer!?!?!?! These were 3 seperate connections that look nothing like each other. One is a screw on connection, one is an overgrown phone jack, and one is a barrel jack. They won't even plug into the wrong place. It's not like she had 2 phone jacks for a modem & couldn't remember which one to put where.... They only go 1 place.
This is closer to the average user than your average slashdot reader.
IIRC there is a strip mine in the US (Kentucky/NC?) that detonates tons of amthor at a time. They actually stagger the blast because the first time they lit it off, China thought we had popped another nuke.
this year I had to do a MB swap on XP, and it puked as already installed on a different system. So they transfered me to a live body. Took almost an hour to get both of us to understand the 25? characters on my liscense and the 25 she read back to me for the activation. Got to love outsourcing to a country that doesn't speak English but the company tries to teach them to speak with a specific English accent.
You are correct, the music industry is not under any obligation to engage in business with any distributor. Check my quote: There are other companies that are already selling music that may want to provide the option to provide apples DRM in addition to MS's plays4sure. I posed that people who already have contracts with the music industry and are selling music to people under 1 form of DRM may want to sell it under the most prevelant form of DRM in the music industry.
If Jon's fairplay clone meets the requirements of the contracts those companies already signed, then the music industry doesn't get to revoke the contracts because they don't like Jon. In the future they don't have to renegotiate contracts with those companies, and in the future they can try to exclude it from contracts. But if their contracts have a DRM performace standards clause, then they are stuck with whatever DRM meets those standards.
So to respond to your personal attacks:
Because they can't claim Apple's DRM is sufficient, but someone else's isn't. Also note that not all of the music is controlled by the RIAA. There are other suppliers out there thay may want to try this. There are other companies that are already selling music that may want to provide the option to provide apples DRM in addition to MS's plays4sure.
IIRC the **AA is requiring DRM that fulfills certain requirements, their contracts do not tie them to a specific DRM - since that would require a contract renegotiation if the DRM is broken, as long as the DRM fulfills the requirements.
Re-read the artical, he's not offering the decryption algorythm to play fairplay media. He's offering the algorythm to encode the media with fairplay. He's offering to sell it to other people to make thier media work with the iPod, not other players work with iTunes.
Also note that CC companies are exempt from state usary laws. Due to the interstate nature of the CC industry the courts decided in 1974 that only the usary laws in the state they are incorperated in apply. Hence Dellaware is a very popular place since it has no usary law.
Thus while MA caps interest at 29.4%, Citibank can happily charge 32% because they are not incorperated in MA. Note that a mortgage company from Dellaware would not be able to do that since they are required to get a state liscense in order to do business in MA. No such need for a CC.
Next on the agenda: How exactly do you know that? If you call Bob, who happens to have forwarded his phone down the street to the Abdi's where he is having dinner, and the Abdi's gave $10 to the local charity that happened to send a cow to a village in Afganistan, that happened to be the hometown of some 'terrorist'. According to this bill, they have every right to monitor your call. Not only that, they can monitor you for 89 days before having to 'notify' the security panel. Note that's 'notify', not request permission to continue. How about if your work requires you to make an international call. If the contents of your call would put the oil industry out of business in 6 months, you don't think Bush & co. would know about it before the end of the day? How about if you're a lawyer and you have to discuss your case with someone who's not in the states? How about if you're a journalist?
Nobody is saying that they shouldn't have access to these tools. What they are saying is that somebody needs to be watching the fox while he's guarding the henhouse. And like any good fox, the Shrub is objecting that he's perfectly trustworthy. Even if I buy that line, how do I know that the person taking office in 28 months is going to be? Hell, how do I know the peon over at the NSA is?
No, I need either oversight, or to trust every member of the executive branch higher than an intern. Of the 2, I think oversight is the better option, 'cause I barely trust my town council not to invoke eminant domain to turn my house into a parking lot - and even there it's mostly because hills make bad parking lots.
It is when the US military is taking actions against US citizens on US soil.
Check the back information on the AT&T debacle in CA. The device they installed can monitor all the voice calls going through the substation in realtime. Not only is it technically possible for them to monitor the calls, they are set up to do it.
The legal responce is "It has a chilling effect on free speech." While not directly forbidding you from saying something, the constant threat of being listened to will diminish your percieved freedom to say things. How likely is somebody to say "Bush is a fricking asshole and is ruining the country" to someone overseas, knowing that the call is going to be monitored and statements like that may put their name on the no-fly list. The speach isn't prohibited, but it certainly is inhibited by the assumed monitoring, and the atmosphere of retaliation presented by the govt.
Try these questions:
- Why exactly should the federal executive branch of the government be exempt from oversight and checks & balances, when every other branch and level is constrained?
- How exactly does that make us safer?
- How exactly does exempting the executive branch of the government from the rules embodied in the Constitution, show to the rest of the world that we are in fact a country of laws?
- How exactly does declaring the use of torture against our "enemies" proper, but it's use by our enemies an obscenety, not make us the two faced hypocrites most of these terrorists/the world already think we are?
When you can answer those questions with coherant arguments, then we might have something to discuss.The military does not prevent the police from taking over a city. The act would be done long before the military could mobilize a response. What keeps it from happening in a coup like fasion your quote implies is the certain knowledge of what would happen afterwords. The things that help minimize the possibility of more manipulative takeovers are oversight, internal affairs, checks & balances, etc. The police are able to get permission to do wiretaps, the feds can get permission up to 3 days after the fact already. In both cases, thier reasoning and suspicions are reviewed by people who's intent is to keep them inside the lines already established. In the 30 year history of FISA 3, count it 3 wiretaps have been turned down. Why by god, they must have a tremendously high hurdle of evidence if once a decade, the government can't make it over it.
The govt has been sued over this & to date they have 3 victories & 1 partial victory using the 'State Secrets' defense. The partial victory is because the Federal judge in question declared the NSA program illegal & filed for an injunction, but also denied the claim for damages.
Ask the Secret Service how to prevent someone from killing the president. You get the same answer, you can't.
Ask the Police how to prevent people from killing each other. Same answer, you can't.
The only thing you can do it manage the risk level. Yes, a portion of that is intelligence, and investigation to identify threats. A portion of it is bodies in place to act on the intelligence. And a portion of it is there after the fact to track it back & use it as intelligence twords the next time. Terrorism prevention is like your harddrive, it's going to fail, the only thing you can do is try to do the reasonable things to make the MTBF as long as possible.
Note that the word reasonable is the keyword here. You can greatly reduce the possibility of the president not being assasinated if he were to just stay in the nuclear shelter under the Whitehouse for the entire time he's in Office. They don't do that because it's not reasonable.
Now ask yourself:
- If 10X the number of US citizens who died during 9/11, die every year in homicides, is it 'reasonable' to spend $2B a week on preventing another 9/11, and refuse to spend $10M a year for more police?
- If it is 'reasonable' for the Federal Govt to ignore the 4th ammendment to prevent deaths, why isn't it 'reasonable' for the local police to do the same? After all, they handle many more deaths on a yearly basis than the Feds do in a decade.
- If the Feds are going to be 'reasonable' about the use of the wiretapping, why do they insist that any oversight of their behaviour will impeed their job?
The constitution garantees protection from "Unreasonable search and seasure". Over and over the courts have made clear that 'reasonable' requires either oversight (in the form of warrents) or the presence of evidence of immediate threat of bodily harm (a trail of blood leading into a house). It's hard to argue the presence of evidence of immediate threat of bodily hard, 24/7/365 for years.I do not believe that anyone is stating that the NSA/FBI/??? can't perform wiretaps. Everyone I hear is saying they have to follow the rules, and be subject to oversite if they want to perform the wiretaps. If it's a real investigation, with real targets, and real enemies, then provide the list of people you are attempting to investigate to the FISA board & get the taps. Yes, the provisions say they can tap all calls going to a person, as long as they get approval within 3 days of starting. I find it hard to believe that it takes more than 72 hours to print off a copy of a warrent request, rubber stamp it, and have an intern cart it off to the FISA board. Why do they not want oversite? What exactly are they doing/going to do that people outside the department with top-secret security clearance can't know about it, or it will 'grossly hinder' their ability to perform their jobs?
The problem is that this isn't monitoring calls to a specific individual. The leaks have indicated that calls to anyone in certain regions are being monitored. Do you know what it takes to get put on the 'terrorist watch' list or the 'suspected terrorist ties' list? I don't, and I'm not certain there are any rules. From what I can tell, if you've donated to a charity that has provided food/education/supplies anywhere in the Middle East in the last 10 years, you are eligible. If you work for one of them, then you're probably on it. If it's affiliated with a Muslim organization in the middle east, make it a certainty. If the rules the NSA wants to follow were applied to regular law enforcement, everyone would be under 24 hour surveilance in case we called Bob 4 states over who's brother was once convicted of passing around a joint at a Grateful Dead concert, in order to try & get a joint of our own.
Why is it complicated? Because, it takes everything we tout to the rest of the world as our greatest asset (our Freedom & Civil Liberties), and says they don't apply. Yes, sometimes you have to perform surgury to remove a tumor. However, I don't recall anyone ever recommending that the surgical process include shooting the patient in the head to limit the amout of blood in the field. FISA is surgury, it's clear, it's tight, and it makes certain that the rules are followed. This new bill & the current NSA program are just the result of the neighborhood butcher trying to perform surgery but not wanting to take the time/make the effort to do it right.
The other thing is, I have heard a bunch of rhetoric about it, but I have never heard a coherent argument as to why - if you have enough information to start a tap, you can't file paperwork within 72 hours of starting. Are they seriously expecting me to believe that 3 Days isn't enough time to have some intern print off a boilerplate & fill in the lines? Or is it that I am supposed to believe that there are so many calls to suspected terrorists that no increase in the number of interns/clerks can keep up with the flood of paperwork?
Either way they are treating us all like a bunch of morons. The latest estimate I saw was that the WoT was costing us $2B a week, I guess actually paying people in the US that money to do real security work just wasn't as politically expediant as paying it to corperations for military hardware and support.
Hmm, his business is suing people. Perhaps the gaming industry could go after him for Lanham (sp?) act violations. IIRC using a baseless lawsuit to harm someones business is illegal & fineable. Hmm, if SCO can sue for $5B for 326 lines of code, $15,337,423/line - we can translate that to suits instead of lines .... I count roughly 20 lawsuits, that's $302M, add tripple damages ... $1.2B against his lawfirm? That might shut him up.
No, vista has been undergoing reverse creep - although it's baseline does seem to keep extending.